Seeing your reply but responding to OP. I've learned there is a very big difference from suicidal to passive suicidal (clinical conditions) (assuming that's what you're referring too) Just because you have the fully loaded cold metal in your hands doesn't mean you'd have the courage to pull the trigger on yourself. Different though, I grew up around firearms everywhere and was taught at a young age to respect them.
Discussion
I meant that, if a male partner, friend, or family member is beating, threatening, or stalking you, adding a gun to the situation will tend to lower your chance of getting away alive, not raise it.
Intimate relationships are a hot mess, and adding firearms to the mess, just makes it even hotter.
For instance, encouraging women who have been sexually abused by an intimate partner to arm themselves is a terrible idea because those women tend to be emotionally upset or even chronically suicidal, and that increases the lethality of their attempts to harm themselves. Even if they pull the gun out, if he attacks them again, they are unlikely to pull the trigger, and then he can just take the gun from them and turn it around. Also, he probably knows where her gun is stored or even has direct access to it, and she probably isn't carrying it around in the home.
A lot has been written about the skyrocketing suicide rates, but it tends to miss the fact that suicide attempts have become increasingly lethal, as easy access to firearms has increased.
One reason why European men do not tend to keep firearms in the home is because they know that the probability that they will use it to defend their home from intruders is much lower than the probability that they will use it to blow their own brains out.
Ropes are pretty accessible, for those who are actually serious.
Very few were serious, back when I was a crisis counsellor for a bit. That's why pills are so popular. Wake up in hospital with a hangover and a week's supply of sympathy and attention.
People don't like the prospect of choking to death. It's slow and tortuous. Guns are quick and painless and now they're the most-popular method for both sexes, in America. Women used to prefer pills, which is why fewer died.
During Corona, Americans bought guns in enormous quantities, and lots of women became gun owners. Since then, they're also blowing their brains. Most gun deaths in America are suicides or murder-suicides.
People buy guns because they're the easiest way to kill strangers, but they usually just use them to off themselves and their loved ones.
Small-calibre handguns are quick, sure, but far from certain and painless. Small calibre rifle attempts not-infrequently fail, too.
Time series data doesn't support the corona-girl-guns-suicide thesis. US suicides declined sharply during COVID, and then resumed their long-term upward trend.
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
~95% of suicide attempts still fail (or were never intended to succeed).
Men are still 80% of completed suicides.
Men are the majority, but womens' numbers nearly doubled and the lethality of their attempts has increased.
Remember that suicide is actually episodic, with most people moving from the impulse to kill themselves to killing themselves between 3 minutes and 8 hours, so convenience and lethality is a factor in how many die. That's why rural people are less likely to report suicidal thoughts, but more likely to die by suicide (they have guns and rope, at hand).
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db509.htm
Also, the sort of person purchasing firearms has changed, since the lockdowns. They are, for lack of a better definition, increasingly emotionally-unstable women, who buy guns because they are scared of men. Guns are marketed to them like comfort animals.
Been raped or you know someone who has?
Buy a gun.
Getting stalked?
Buy a gun.
Break-ins in your neighborhood?
Buy a gun.
Car-jackings up?
Buy a gun.
Trump lost the election?
Buy a gun.
Trump won the election?
Buy a gun.
Too many immigrants wandering around?
Buy a gun.
This is the first time, in the history of the world, where men have decided it's a good idea to load terrified women up with firearms.
I'm sorry, but I see this as a massive dereliction of duty, on part of the men. Women should not be living in fear, like this.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2785592
Gonna sound cold, but I see this as a hopeful development, and I wish Australia could join the experiment.
A younger friend and former colleague of mine grew up painfully white and privileged, and during her teenage years she studied all the crime stories she could find, especially rapes. Developed a minor social media following as an influencer. Drank her own koolaid and became a near shut-in by age 20, fearing that all the boys in her uni class were following her.
Her story becomes unusual in that she then realised she was self-harming by cultivating this very fashionable fear, and started exercising her formidable will to diminish the neuroses she had previously cultivated so assiduously.
She now works for our Federal govt, and if I recited her political beliefs most of Nostr would excommunicate me just for knowing her. Yeah, she's pretty Woke. She's a high-functioning alcoholic and now very overweight. Can't keep a boyfriend. Has never been the victim of a violent crime.
Wants a kid, and would be an absolute trainwreck of a mother.
Compared to millions like her, she has remarkable insight and self-awareness, and she does NOT blame men for her suffering. I don't want anything bad to happen to her.
But the millions like her... if they commited suicide, average parenting and future national culture would be markedly improved.
I think it's unfair to demand women be like men, for decades, and then blame them when some of them eventually go a bit insane.
Womens' intense need for safety and security is the basis of pairbonding and nestmaking, and it protects them from harm or capture.
Married women are the safest, because their mates tend to be better behaved, they engage in less risky behavior, they live in safer neighborhoods, and they are inconvenient targets for strange criminals. Making women terrified of marriage, in particular, has been a disservice. Feminists decried this as "the devil you know" tactic, but obfuscating where real danger was most likely, left women simply alone and afraid of all men, which sometimes warped their minds.
100%.
I don't have a solution, though. I don't want to restrict young womens' choices of belief or lifestyle.
Platforms without engagement-maximising algorithms should help (although my friend started with paper). Importing emotionally-healthy women from other cultures, too..
But otherwise I think we're just going to have to watch this trainwreck unfold, and trust differential fertility will take its course.
(Sadly, federally-funded universities give the Woke a second chance to reproduce their maladies. Defunding that would help.)
Sorry for the curveball but what if anti woke also turns into a mind virus, then what?! I mean it’s all just memes really.
I struggle to keep of with all the ideas, things, habits and planetary spacecraft described as woke.
Other than that, this is an interesting conversation. Carry on…
Its mind virii all the way down :p
If Woke were COVID19, 80s-90s "Christian Conservatism" would be SARS
What is probably needed is a restoration of cultural mores governing interactions between the sexes. Right now there basically aren't any. Chivalry? Respect? Common decency? None of those are a guarantee.
That doesn't require anyone forcing anyone into anything else, but it does require a strong cadre of virtuous role models to set the example (and fashions, to some degree) that everyone else will follow. It's a generational project.